(Yes, Yomi is now in French! Click on the French flag at the Play page to switch languages, and have fun. Puzzle Strike is still only in English for now.)

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With weekly rotating free characters, gold-granting Quick Matches, the Store where you can buy gold directly, and the Star Membership granting complete access to everything, there are already many ways to enjoy the games here at fantasystrike.com.

But today, we're giving you yet another way: we're giving away free gold when you recruit your friends to fantasystrike.com! You'll win 3200 gold (the price of a full Yomi or Puzzle Strike character) for each friend you recruit to fantasystrike.com, when they reach the rank of Master 1 in any game.

To count as being recruited by you, your friend must make their account through a recruitment link you send them. You can click on any friend in the new Facebook Friends tab on the game page to get the option of sending them your recruitment link directly through a Facebook message. Alternatively, by clicking on the "N friends recruited" part of the new bottom bar on the game page, you can copy your recruitment link, then paste it to them in a chat or email.

There is no limit on the bonus gold you can win by recruiting, so don't hesitate to tell all your friends about us!

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In more development news, I've been improving the ways in which you can start playing the games. Yomi is often popular for its spectator features, which let a group of friends be in the same game room while two of them duke it out, but until recently, it was fairly awkward to rotate between spectators and players between games. Yomi also had trouble with enforcing double-blind character selection in custom games (important for tournaments!), and you couldn't change room settings like timer speed without remaking the room.

My answer to these problems is the new match lobby: whenever you start a game, you first go through the lobby screen, where players and spectators (and Yomibots!) can easily rotate, and where the game's host can change game settings directly.

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Puzzle Strike had a different problem: bot games were seemingly too popular, and it was common to see more rooms filled with one human and a bot or two than actual multiplayer games. Part of this was a perception problem: if you started a bot game while waiting for more players to join, that game would be listed under "Full matches", and the Join button would be greyed out. A challenger would need to click Watch on your "Full" game, and ask you to start a game with them - not the most intuitive thing to do!

To improve this, bot games are now listed under Available Matches, with their Join button enabled. When a challenger joins your room, you'll get a button to start a new game with them. The idea is to make it easier for challengers to join your game, and still let you beat up some Puzzlebots while waiting.

(If you just want a peaceful bot game, just put any password on your game to prevent challengers from joining.)

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Yet another fun feature to make it easier to invite your friends to a game: game invite links. Check out the settings pane (gear icon in topright) while in a game to get the invite link for that game - paste that to a friend to let them zip straight to the game page and immediately enter your game room with a single click.

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You can also send game invites directly through Facebook by clicking their name in the Facebook friends list and choosing Invite to game.

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As always, you can read the detailed update notes in the forums, in the development threads for Yomi and Puzzle Strike.